Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen in Term Paper

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Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen

In his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen attempts to explain why the Holocaust happened. Central to his thesis is the notion that German citizens were essentially regular human beings, living conventional lives, with complex social relationships and family obligations, who also happened to be staffing police battalions, organizing death marches, working in concentration and slave labor camps and basically facilitating Hitler's overwhelmingly murderous plan.

Daniel Goldhagen explores the motives behind the seemingly normalized crimes of mainstream German society, using as examples thousands of ordinary people who tormented, starved and murdered their former friends and neighbors. The author suggests that the nature of anti-Semitism at the time offered a palpable motive to German society, and partly explains the perpetrators' actions. Furthermore, Goldhagen tracks the history of anti-Semitism in Germany for several centuries and points out that it was a sentiment so deeply rooted in the collective conscience, for so many generations, that Germans were willing to kill Jews even when they would not have been penalized for refusing to do so.

The Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, was "the defining feature of German society during its Nazi period"; "No analysis of German society," he continues, "no understanding or characterization of it, can be made without placing the persecution and extermination of the Jews at its center" (p. 8).

Because the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany long predated Hitler, the dictator was able to appeal to this vulnerability and orchestrate the mechanism of the Holocaust with virtually no challenge from his constituents.

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Anti-Semitism was a part of German culture, and the Nazis were able to introduce the concept of Holocaust with such ease, because for ordinary Germans, it simply made sense.

On page one of his book, Goldhagen quotes a German (non SS) commander who vocally protests a decree calling for his men to sign a promise not to steal. The commander felt strongly that this was an insulting assumption, and an affront to their character, and he led his men in a protest refusing to sign. This same commander was already responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews, but was not the least bit reluctant to vociferously protest issues that struck him as immoral. But annihilation of the Jews was different, according to Goldhagen, since it did not strike ordinary German citizens as being the least bit immoral.

For much of his book, Goldhagen challenges conventional accounts of the Holocaust, which tend to focus on the few factory-like extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Though he understands the morbid interest in these unbelievable killing machines, he argues that most of the killing of the Holocaust was much more personalized and mainstream. "Virtually no evidence exists," Goldhagen writes, "to contradict the notion that the intense and ubiquitous public declaration of anti-Semitism was mirrored in people's private beliefs" (p. 30).

Goldhagen takes all….....

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